REUNION AT DAWN, page 1
REUNION AT DAWN
and Other Uncollected
Ghost Stories
H. R. Wakefield
REUNION AT DAWN
ISBN: 9781553102045 (Kindle edition)
ISBN: 9781553102052 (ePub edition)
Published by Christopher Roden
for Ash-Tree Press
P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia
Canada V0K 1A0
http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm
First electronic edition 2012
First Ash-Tree Press edition 2000
This is a work of fiction. Names, character, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume any responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.
This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2012
Collection and Introduction © Peter Ruber 2000, 2012
Afterword © Barbara Roden 2000, 2012
Cover illustration © Paul Lowe, 2000, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.
Produced in Canada
CONTENTS
Introduction by Peter Ruber
Reunion at Dawn
The Fire-Watcher’s Story
Parrot Cry
Surprise for Papa
Final Variation
The Sandwich
The Fall of the House of Gilpin
Vengeance is Ours!
The Assignation
The Latch-Key
‘The Night Can Sweat with Terror’
At World’s End
An Air of Berlioz
The Bodyguard
‘That Sleep of Death’
Familiar Spirit
A Man’s Best Friend
Afterword by Barbara Roden
REUNION AT DAWN
Introduction
‘NO ONE CAN TOP YOU for sheer churlishness.’ So wrote Arkham House publisher August Derleth to British ghost story writer H. Russell Wakefield, a man not always highly regarded for his charm, and one who did not hesitate to be abusive when the mood struck. Wakefield’s eighteen-year correspondence with Derleth is saturated with emotional extremes: anxiety attacks over money and stinging notes berating Derleth’s writing ability, counter-balanced with cordial chatter and notes of appreciation for the efforts Derleth had been making to keep the aging curmudgeon’s name in print.
It wasn’t exactly a typical author-publisher relationship, but literary records show that Wakefield’s behavioural digressions weren’t unique. Creative people are sometimes difficult to deal with or have an inflated opinion of the value of their literary brain-children. Although Derleth could dish out vitriolic comments as well as he received them, his responses to Wakefield’s verbal attacks were professionally restrained; nor did he ever waver in his belief that Wakefield was one of the best and perhaps most under-appreciated ghost story writers of the twentieth century.
Whether Wakefield’s work merited Derleth’s high opinion is not for me to judge. He didn’t particularly like Wakefield as a person, and once described him to fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith as ‘a notorious drunk’. However, he did not allow personal feelings to influence his critical judgment of any writer’s work, nor interrupt their business relationship. Those few writers who tried to cheat him by conducting business transactions that were in violation of a publishing agreement were reproached. Derleth expected his writers to adhere to the same ethical conduct as he did, and those who did not were dropped from the Arkham House schedule.
But he tolerated certain exceptions, particularly when a writer sold subsidiary rights without permission because he was in a financial bind and needed a quick infusion of cash, as did Frank Belknap Long on occasion. And though displeased with such actions, he always managed to give those writers a way out to save face. He understood from long personal experience as a professional freelance writer the financial uncertainties of the game, and that not all writers had his versatility in adapting to changing market conditions.
In the case of H. Russell Wakefield, the differences were never ethical in nature; it was simply a matter of tolerating Wakefield’s griping and sniping, when he was immersed in a marathon drinking binge and was feeling paranoid about his failing career, or needed some quick cash. Wakefield was also annoyed that Derleth took such a long time to publish Strayers From Sheol, after buying the North American rights to the British edition through the author’s agent for a lump sum advance of $600.
One of Wakefield’s more blistering attacks about the delayed release of Strayers from Sheol concluded with this threat: ‘I’m not pretending I’m a great performer in any way, but I’m a darned sight better than you! . . . Enough! This is farewell. I shan’t write again.’
Derleth must have shaken his head while reading this, and he replied with both barrels:
Becoming abusive is either childish or senile. Please recall my letter. Our agreement mentions no specific date for publication. If you are so convinced that I have valuable property in my files, you need only leap at my offer—buy it back at the $600, which is what I paid for it. I’ve tried to tell you before that the only reason Arkham House exists is that major publishers are very chary about bringing out collections of macabre tales, other than in anthologies. Even a small House must publish authors who sell readily, and, to be perfectly frank, Wakefield does not sell readily. Your book received and receives exactly the same amount of publicity that any one of our books receives. Despite this fact, it is an unhappy reality that American readers in the macabre tend rather to buy more familiar American names than the work of often superior British writers. I have yet to earn $600 of the $750 paid to you for THE CLOCK STRIKES TWELVE. That is neither your fault nor mine—the fact is that a name like Lovecraft—(and even Derleth, inferior craftsman though he may be)—is more familiar to American readers than that of Wakefield.
Despite their ups and downs, Derleth did his best to promote Wakefield’s work in the United States, where he was an unknown quantity. He retyped Wakefield’s ratty manuscripts, which sometimes came in only partially typed (the remaining portions were handwritten), and agented whatever he could sell to magazines and to anthologies; a few were also sold for radio dramatisations. His British agent also made sales to BBC television on Wakefield’s behalf; this activity continued for several years after Wakefield’s death, as Derleth’s correspondence with Jessica Russell Wakefield reveals. Derleth gave a greater portion of his time to helping Wakefield make sales in the U.S. than he gave to other Arkham House authors, many of whom were friends of long standing.
There is no question in my mind that Derleth’s motivation was simply that he enjoyed Wakefield’s stories. For underneath, Derleth was a genuine bookman who began collecting at a young age. He collected the books of writers he admired, and he was partial to British mysteries and ghost stories and American regional fiction, on which topic he was a recognised authority and teacher. He also collected histories, biographies, literary criticism, and poetry, eventually accumulating a personal library of more than 12,000 books. Over his lifetime, he undoubtedly donated an equal number of books to the local library.
He had founded Arkham House in 1939 (with Donald Wandrei) to publish the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, one of his early mentors, and then built up the firm at considerable personal and financial sacrifice, around the authors he befriended during his pulp magazine writing days. But he didn’t ignore young writers of promise, publishing writers like Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley, whom he felt had a future.
One can readily understand Derleth’s appreciation of Wakefield’s quiet little weird stories. His plot-lines were not always original, yet they had elements of freshness. His greatest strength lay in his ability to tell a story in a simple and direct style, without undue physical violence or horror. Wakefield had a deft touch in creating unlovable and seedy characters who, for reasons such as greed, revenge, or lust, become victims or catalysts of catastrophic events. And there is frequently a timeless quality in his stories that prevents them from becoming obviously dated in the contemporary reader’s eyes.
A number of the stories in this new collection are quite exceptional and may eventually rank with Wakefield’s best work in the weird genre. In ‘At World’s End’, a child is murdered and possibly molested, and a heavy-drinking journalist is determined to point the finger of guilt at a local reclusive peddler, for no solid reason other than that the man had been seen talking to the girl earlier that day, and looked suspicious. It is a fascinating study of how one person can spawn mob violence.
In the story ‘A Man’s Best Friend’, that best friend is his mother; but to an unscrupulous politician who will stop at nothing to get elected, murdering his mother simply becomes a matter of expediency to help him get one step closer to the top. Then there’s Owen, a shiftless lout who is ‘The Bodyguard’, or rather night-watchman, of a small but fashionable upscale couturier. Hounded by gambling losses, a nagging wife, and a love for drink, he brings death to his employer and destruction upon himself.
‘Parrot Cry’ is another favourite tale of mine. We are introduced to a nic
There are many other memorable stories in Reunion at Dawn which deserve to be remembered; and every reader will find his or her own favourites. This book may become the most important Wakefield collection yet published, because all the stories are unpublished—definitely unpublished in terms of never having appeared in any previous Wakefield book; nor in any August Derleth anthology. Whether a select few ever achieved magazine publication in U.S. or British pulp magazines is not known. I suspect they did not. Several were among the last stories Wakefield wrote, according to letters exchanged between August Derleth and the late author’s wife, Jessica Russell Wakefield.
Unfortunately, their titles were never mentioned in that correspondence. Very likely they are the only survivors of Wakefield’s final folly: for in the closing weeks before his death, he systematically destroyed all his correspondence, manuscripts, tearsheets, photographs—every shred of his literary and earthly existence. One can speculate about the motives behind this strange act of literary genocide, but the real reasons will never be known.
As a book, Reunion at Dawn materialized in an odd and indirect way. Its roots go back more than thirty years, to a time when August Derleth sent me several extra carbon copies of Wakefield stories he had edited and typed out in previous decades. I no longer recall the exact circumstances of why he sent them. Possibly they were related to one of several projects we were working on together; perhaps I had requested them for an anthology I was assembling. Anyway, it was a long time ago, in another lifetime—the latter half of the 1960s, when I was publishing a number of Derleth’s books through the Candlelight Press.
My next encounter with Wakefield’s fiction came about in late 1996, shortly before I became involved in the editorial activities of Arkham House. April Derleth gave me access to a great reservoir of her father’s manuscripts and files that had not been archived at the Wisconsin State Historical Society. They had been stored in basement boxes and in cubby-hole cabinets around the house, untouched for more than a quarter of a century. Stuffed into a folder containing portions of the Derleth-Wakefield correspondence were a group of Wakefield stories. As that folder also contained tearsheets of Wakefield stories I knew had been published in The Arkham Sampler (1948–9), I did not give them much thought, until I began work on Arkham House’s 60th anniversary anthology, Arkham’s Masters of Horror.
As Wakefield was to be included among the twenty-one featured writers, with both a biographical essay and a rare or unusual story, I decided to read those manuscripts with the hope of finding a suitable tale for the anthology. Knowing there were additional Wakefield manuscripts at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, I ordered photocopies so I would have a larger selection to work with. Not having followed Wakefield publishing activity in the past thirty years (other than being aware that Ash-Tree Press had published several collections), I had no idea if any had escaped book or anthology publication, and I consulted with more knowledgeable persons in the weird-fiction collecting community to help me determine their status. One such story, ‘The Latch-Key’, could not be traced by Stefan Dziemianowicz. That immediately solved my problem. I had an unpublished Wakefield story.
After Arkham’s Masters of Horror had been shipped off to the typesetters, and as I began to reorganise the files I had ransacked, I noticed that I had an unusual number of Wakefield stories, and I took further steps to trace their origin. Rather surprisingly, no one could identify the other fifteen stories in this group. A quick word count revealed there were enough for a book; and that got me thinking about the possibility of publishing them. It wasn’t a viable opportunity for Arkham House given the size of our print runs; and as a short-run limited edition such a book would not have been profitable. So I approached Ash-Tree Press, whose operation was geared to limited edition publishing. It also seemed the better fit because Ash-Tree has made a considerable effort over the last several years to collect and publish all of Wakefield’s weird and ghostly fiction.
There were several quixotic twists to bringing this collection to a close. When a colleague of mine again checked the index of author manuscripts in the Derleth archives at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, I found one Wakefield title I had previously overlooked, called ‘The Assignation’. It became the seventeenth story. And the manuscript of ‘The Bodyguard’ which I had appeared curiously incomplete. Both Barbara Roden and I tried our hands at shaping a conclusion, but neither attempt proved satisfactory all around. At the zero hour, when Reunion at Dawn was in page proofs, I took another look at the Historical Society’s list and found there was still another copy of ‘The Bodyguard’. My colleague investigated and discovered that this other draft had two more pages than my copy. The missing pages were faxed to me, which I in turn faxed to Ash-Tree. All of us breathed a sigh of relief.
In the introduction to a previous Wakefield collection Barbara Roden noted that by his own admission, Wakefield had written somewhere around one-hundred ghostly stories. With some seventy stories in print, there had been much speculation about the missing thirty; and long-standing rumours that a group may have been assembled by August Derleth for publication by Arkham House finally proved to be true: about half of the manuscripts had been retyped in a format ready for delivery to a printer. There were also variants more formally prepared for submission to magazine editors. So we are now down to about thirteen or fourteen missing stories. Do they exist somewhere? I cannot say. Will they ever be found? One can always hope.
In the meantime, I hope you take pleasure in reading this book. Undoubtedly it contains the last new collection of H. Russell Wakefield stories you and I will ever read.
Peter Ruber
Oakdale, New York
February 2000
Reunion at Dawn
MAISIE BELDAME TIPPED BACK the glass of neat whisky. She had been drinking on and off all day and for several previous days. She wasn’t used to it, and she had that type of unstable temperament which is peculiarly vulnerable to hard liquor, so it was hitting her hard. She wasn’t exactly drunk, but she knew she ‘wasn’t herself’. In other words, her flawless egoism and utterly self-centred amorality were less straitly under control than usual. She both liked and mistrusted the sensation. She began to undress, and then paused. Should she undress? Why not? It was very late and the undertaker’s men were coming at nine, but she could get a few hours sleep. A dead body was nothing. Just a cold, decaying mess. Nothing. Everything frightening about it had gone. She got up and locked the door. Gone. Gone where? Nowhere. Just stopped, vanished, ended for ever. If she hadn’t drunk so much she would be worrying about it all. In the morning they’d come and take it away and put it in the ground. And about time too! Put it in the ground where it would rot away and become just part of the cemetery, poison and all. She’d be glad to see the earth shovelled onto it. Buried deep. Then she’d be quite safe at last. And free to marry Bob. How nice and easy that doctor had been—and what a fool! She’d been terrified at first, but there’d been no need to be. How lucky he had been a young, man doctor. She’d given him plenty of eye—all she had dared in the sad circumstances—and, of course, he’d taken far more notice of her than of Bert. Men were all alike when they wanted that and thought there was a chance of getting it. Always hoping there was something doing, and that made mugs of them. She smiled vacuously, took off her corset and vest and, swaying a little, surveyed her taut torso in the glass. That was what Bob liked to cuddle and what the doctor had guessed at and hoped to sample. What a hope for him! What did girls who hadn’t got them do for looks and a good figure? They must feel paralysed. Yet breasts were quite dull and almost funny, though hers were far better than most. Fancy them making men feel that way. What fools! That doctor had hardly listened to what she’d burbled about Bert, about his drinking and sleeplessness and heart attacks and drugs, and all the other lies. He’d probably try and see her again. Nothing doing! She’d be all Bob’s till she got fed up with him and found someone better—as she certainly would one day. Then—well, she’d have to be very careful next time. Smaller doses more often would be better.
